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Monothelitism

One will or two — the last great Christological controversy

“Father, if You are willing, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.”

Luke 22:42 — Gethsemane, the verse the whole controversy turned on

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The Doctrine

Monothelitism (from monos, one, and thelēma, will) is the seventh-century teaching that Christ, though acknowledged in two natures, possesses only one will. It was born less as a heresy than as a peace treaty: after Chalcedon (451) split the empire from the churches that could not accept “two natures,” the emperors sought a formula both sides might sign. First came monoenergism — one divine-human energy or operation in Christ — and when that failed, one will. If Christ’s two natures could at least be said to will as one, perhaps the empire could too.

The church finally judged the compromise a wound to the gospel itself, and the reason is Gethsemane. There Christ prays, “not My will, but Yours, be done” — two willings, meeting in one obedient person. The champions of the two-wills answer (dyothelitism), above all Maximus the Confessor, argued that the will belongs to the nature, not the person: a complete human nature must include a human will, or Christ is not fully man. And what he has not assumed, he has not healed — Gregory of Nazianzus’s old axiom — so if Christ has no human will, then the human will, the very seat of our rebellion, is the one thing left unredeemed. Maximus added the careful distinction that Christ’s human will is a natural will, not a gnomic (wavering, deliberating) one: he wills humanly, but never in opposition to God.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople III, 680–681) therefore confessed in Christ “two natural wills and two natural operations, without division, without change, without partition, without confusion” — his human will “following, and not resisting or opposing, his divine and almighty will.” The definition is received by Orthodoxy, Rome, and the Reformation alike; it is one of the places where all three streams of the comparison table still stand on common ground.

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The History

The one-will formula rose in an empire fighting for its life — Persia at the gates, then Islam — and fell only after it had cost a pope his life and a monk his tongue and right hand.

451 →

After Chalcedon, the churches of Egypt, Syria, and Armenia refuse the two-natures definition. For emperors, the schism is a security crisis on the empire’s most vulnerable frontiers — and every reunion scheme since Zeno’s has failed.

610s–633

Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople float monoenergism: one divine-human operation. It briefly works — in 633 Cyrus of Alexandria wins over many non-Chalcedonians. The monk Sophronius (soon patriarch of Jerusalem) raises the first alarm: the formula sells Chalcedon short.

634–638

Sergius writes to Pope Honorius, who answers with the fateful phrase “we confess one will of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In 638 Heraclius’s Ecthesis makes one-will teaching imperial policy — even as Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria fall to the new Arab armies, dissolving the schism the formula was meant to heal.

645–649

Maximus the Confessor emerges as the resistance: in 645 he publicly debates the deposed patriarch Pyrrhus in Carthage and wins. In 649 Pope Martin I convenes the Lateran Council, which condemns monothelitism — defying the emperor’s Typos, which had banned the whole discussion.

653–662

The price. Martin is arrested, tried for treason in Constantinople, and dies in Crimean exile (655) — the last pope venerated as a martyr. Maximus, refusing to the end, is tried and mutilated: his tongue and right hand — the instruments of confession — are cut off. He dies in exile in 662, an old man of eighty.

680–681

Vindication. The Third Council of Constantinople — the Sixth Ecumenical Council — defines two natural wills in Christ and condemns the monothelite line by name: Sergius, Cyrus, Pyrrhus — and Honorius, a pope anathematized by an ecumenical council, cited ever after in the debates over papal infallibility. Maximus, unnamed at the council, supplies its entire theology.

Since

Dyothelitism stands unchallenged in East and West; the Maronites of Lebanon, long accused of monothelite origins (a charge they dispute), entered full communion with Rome affirming the two wills. Gethsemane is read ever since as the healing of the human will — the moment our “not Your will but mine,” spoken in Eden, is reversed in the garden.